The Lessons From Calling Your Father A Cow
Tech Tribe Dispatch 137
💡 Think:
A chassidic story for the social media era.
After the previous Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, was expelled from the Soviet Union for anti-soviet activities, he ultimately settled in Poland. There he expanded the Chabad run Tomchei Temimim network of yeshivos. These schools drew many yeshivah students from other chasidic, but not Chabad, communities.
One such student was a student named Sinai Torbiner. He came from a Gerer chasidic family, but took wholeheartedly to the Chabad mode of prayer and divine service. He would devote hours to contemplation and prayer each Shabbat. As a result, when he got home, the Shabbat meal was cold. His own personal stringencies meant that he further abstained from many other dishes at the table.
His father, who by the time his son returned from prayers, had not only finished the Shabbat meal but had also completed his Shabbat afternoon nap, was annoyed. At one point, in conversation, he said, "Why can’t you have a normal Shabbat experience? You don't eat meat? You don't drink? You don’t take a nap?"
Sinai, perturbed by this depiction of Shabbat as only about the physical delicacies consumed and physical rest, lost his cool.
"Tatty," he said in Yiddish "Du bist dach a beheima! Father, you're a farm animal!"
His father was furious. Dragging his son to the head of the yeshivah, he fumed: "I send my son to your school, to find him turned against me?"
The head of the yeshivah apologized and had Sinai apologize as well.
Later, the head of the Yeshivah called Sinai over - after all, the father's coarse understanding of Shabbat as an obsession over food was a little unseemly...
"Not everything that you think," he told Sinai. "Do you need to say."
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